(12-01-2013 08:52 PM)Refuting_Ignorance_Every_Day Wrote: At the end of the day, KC can feel free to live in his own little fantasy world.
Arguments and discussions on YouTube are much easier (they trend to get insulting, however).

Dude, just going to flat out say... you really suck at debate.

You addressed nothing that was brought to the table. You ignored a call for definitions. You slathered on the fallacies. And then, you blame your ineptitude on the opposing stance.

You need a lot of work.

Glean some of the tactics other members used against me. That's actual debate.

He's right RIED. Take this as a learning experience. You went in guns blazing and approached the argument the entirely wrong way. You didn't understand that you had failed to create an agreed set of parameters, and approached this in a typical gung-ho fashion, "throw out this point and that point to show the idiocy of his beliefs." The issue isn't whether or not your points were wrong, the issue was that they weren't relevant to the debate that was supposed to have been laid out.

The capability of KC comprehending your argument wasn't what made you lost. You lost because you didn't go by the correct parameters and because you, quite frankly, aren't that skilled yet at constructing formidable arguments. You will get there with time though.

Also, Youtube arguments are pathetic piss-fights. It's easier because you don't have to work your brain. Doing well in youtube arguments isn't a credential that translates into effective debating anywhere else.

It was almost painful to read, mostly because RIED reminded me of myself a few years ago. Fortunately I think if I went head to head with KC I might be able to actually put up a fight now.

Not that I will mind, I don't like having inadmissible evidence submitted to me, and that is the only way it could go down..

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.

RE: KC, I Challenge You To A Debate On the Existence of God (copied from The Boxing R

REID, a few thoughts on your side of things:
You started with very general terms for the debate. You began by allowing a deistic god to be used and a less confident opponent might have taken you up on that. KC really gave you a gift by claiming he would defend the Biblical god, because this god has many more definable and refutable properties than the deistic god has. You also did not define what a win condition would look like. KC took the ball and ran with that, seeking to make your win condition "the biblical god is categorically disproven" and your loss condition "the biblical god has not been disproven". You'll note in my summary of KC's argument that I criticised the equivalence of the Biblical god with the statistically insignificant god of today. A less well rounded believer would simply have rejected my notion of statistical insignificance, but KC took it on (without explicitly agreeing to it). Perhaps that would have been a useful debate tactic. For example, you could talk about the conflict between the ten commandments description of God as jealous, and the modern state of affairs where God seems to actively promote other religions by planting false revelation (or at least allowing such revelation to be planted) seemingly to cover his track in providing true revelation to his elect while still maintaining his statistical insignificance. That's not an argument you could make against a deistic god because the deistic god doesn't need to conform to the extensive documentation that is available describing Yahweh's properties.

In short, a strong opening that characterises what you think a win condition will look like for you and roughly how you intend to go about it goes a long way in a debate.

When the debate got going you started with "Present your evidence for God" and seemed to provide what you thought was your evidence against God. It might have been better to either ask for a definition of God from KC that you could pull apart, perhaps add to, and argue about. What you are generally looking to argue is that either God's defined properties contradict each other, or that those properties contract the natural order of things - ie reality. There are other debate tactics available such as arguing from consequences (the Crusades man!) and the like but not only do these tend to be logical fallacies, but they open up your side to criticism (well what about Stalin then?). My sense is that it is useful to stick to a few core points rather than get out the shotgun to try and see what sticks, although some apologists seem to employ the shotgun approach to some useful effect. As for the "no robed white guy yet" argument - presumably this was a joke? Most theists (7th day adventists aside perhaps) will claim that their god exists apart from creation and does not exist within this universe. A common idea would be that God is outside of space and time and is able to interact with all of space time in ways he sees fit, perhaps operating in some additional dimension or other kind of non-universe context.

Your next point was that faith in a god is almost equal to belief in leprechauns, fairies, etc. This can be countered in a number of ways. For example, a theist may claim that the universe or its beginning necessitates a god. They may claim that they have a personal relationship with a god, but no personal relationship with other mythical creatures. Both of these avenues for debate are long rabbit holes where it is difficult to get a clean win. I believe KC's position is that god in some way upholds the universe, and that the physics of the universe exist as an expression of God's power rather than as a machine that God created and now runs by itself. I could be wrong on that - if I am I apologise. In any case that is an unfalsifiable claim. Likewise the relationship with god claim is at its core unfalsifiable or intended to be unfalsifiable. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced brain scanning and modelling we could falsify it. In any case, arguing against an unfalsifiable position in general will not win you a debate. I see it as better to look for openings where an opponent does state something falsifiable in which case you could challenge them to test their claim, to evaluate existing evidence they may not be aware of, or to otherwise argue their claim is false. If a provably false claim is central to an opponent's argument then you will be able to chop down those arguments that rest upon it. Unfalsifiable claims are only able to be chopped down in the framing of the debate in some way disallows their use - perhaps because the debate is occurring in a sufficiently scientific context or for whatever other reason.

Here what you could have done is jump on KC's irrefutability claim and ask why this is necessarily so. It seems a strange claim to rest other arguments on, so presumably must be based on some other reasoning process. Digging into that reasoning process might yield some gems of irrationality or stretches of believability that could come in handy. Also KC's basis for belief could be challenged. Why believe his own revelation is true and not believe that the revelation of a Muslim is true, for example? He provided you a few routes you could have gone down but you really ignored those avenues to instead insult his faith by equating it with things he presumably believes are false. If you are going to follow that line of debate you really need to explain why one is equivalent to the other and be prepared for KC's counter arguments. The fact that we can explain the known universe from a few moments after the big bang to now with a fair degree of scientific certainty and without recourse to unknown laws of physics is a good starting point if your opponent is basing their argument on the necessity of a god but doesn't really address key points by itself.

Having scored no hits you move onto biblical morality. There is the generic problem of evil - the existence of a good omnipotent god seems contradictory to the idea that evil exists in the world (or suffering or other formulation). This is generally countered by the theist saying that god allows free will, and stepping in to stop evil or suffering would interfere with our autonomy in a way that would result in more negative moral outcomes than the evil or suffering would have caused by itself. That defence can be argued against, but more difficult seems to be the problem of God's evil. You point out that the Bible records God saying morally atrocious things and commanding morally atrocious acts. Now what is moral is hard to define, but I think most people can rationally get together and say something like "genocide is morally wrong". God seems not to know genocide is wrong.

The calvinist answer to this problem of God's evil is essentially that God is perfect. "Perfect" is never defined in human terms. It can only be understood in terms of the actions of God. Whatever God did must have been perfect because he is perfect. This circular definition of perfection is one of those unfalsifiable positions that wins nothing in a debate and at the same time makes it very difficult to make up ground against. In this case God's perfection resulted in pronouncements and commands that seem immoral to us, but are actually perfect. They only seem immoral because we have a limited reference frame in which to judge the moral outcomes of actions whereas God has an unlimited reference frame. God knew that without the genocide of a particular people group his people would have been infected by their evil practices and his plan for the salvation of mankind would have been derailed. In order to avoid greater immoral consequences God chose to take actions that seem morally repugnant but whose ends justify their means. Anyway, what's to say that our core values of the sanctity of human life are really relevant in this context? God's values are by definition superior to ours

If you want to take that kind of argument down you have to find a way for your opponent to begin to engage their own moral reasoning processes. That's a long process where you need to come to shared understandings about what morality is and why it exists etc and is most often fruitless. You could talk about why a superior being should be expected to present a consistent moral demeanour to we the lesser beings so that we can reasonably come to trust him and accept him... but if in the end your opponent is happy to accept that for the most part God doesn't want people to know him, trust him, be able to find him, etc but instead just picks names out of a hat and reveals himself to them no amount of reasoning will help you. They already accept that the god is immoral by our standards and from our vantage point, but see it as us who are wrong in this regard.

Next you make some nonspecific statements that the Bible is not very original and is not as contemporary an account as we would like in many cases. These are true and go to question of whether the Bible is a trustworthy document and whether it can be considered infallible and read literally. These are questions that you brought to the table rather than your opponent. Your opponent was not claiming Biblical infallibility, and I'm not sure that he takes the stance that it is infallible. As with several other arguments you put forward they neither deal directly with the question of God's existence nor refute any specific point that your opponent has made. The reliability of the Bible and what that means to both believer and nonbeliever alike is again a deep topic that you could spend many debates on by itself. Raising it as a bullet point in the way you have done doesn't help because you were not clear about what point you were really trying to make and how it relates to the debate topic, the existence or nonexistence of Yahweh.

In the end you put forward a bunch of common objections to the Christian God and related topics in bullet-point form without clear explanation of the point you were trying to make with each and without a clear explanation as to how that point contributed to the debate topic. You didn't address the points your opponent made and you didn't really delve into what it is that your opponent believes in order to uncover potential internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with reality. You used a scattergun approach where you brought up a topic without really delving into the topic and then when it didn't turn out to be a winning blow you moved onto the next topic. A guy like KC has heard every argument you can bring and he has a reasonably internally-consistent view of his beliefs. If you are going to score points against him in any kind of debate context you really need to delve into what that model really is and try to figure out where he gets things wrong either in the truth statements that make up his world view or in the reasoning processes that have gone into arriving at those truth statements.

Anyway you then move onto claiming his beliefs are false and saying it's impossible to debate him. You accuse him of taking the Bible at face value, which I'm sure he doesn't. You say he's being irrational about his faith, and I think that's at least partially true in the sense that he trusts in the revelation given to him and doesn't subject that revelation to the same kinds of tests that we might apply in other situations in our lives. That doesn't have anything to do with the existence of God though You seem to have forgotten the debate topic completely at this stage. The formal part of the debate ends with you not making any really clear points about the existence or nonexistence of God. What the debate does tell us is a little of why you have taken the particular position you have on belief in God. The reasons you put forward for your position seem reasonable but could perhaps do with a little deeper study both into the major debate points between theists and atheists over the last few thousand years and into the nature of the theistic beliefs that have come out of that critical process. Certainly what we have today is a much more passive god concept that has evolved as its territory has been chipped away. This passivity has shrouded the god concept in greater and greater mystery and its believers see themselves as specially connected to this mystery. Perhaps in the end the way to get to the heart of a dedicated theist is to show them more and more of the real world and how it works. Strip back the mystery and show them a world that is profoundly understandable and in whose understanding God plays no part - perhaps even clouding the issue and complicating simple facts. Let them understand relativity and quantum physics. Let them delve into the technology that we live with and how it functions. Let them see the expertise of those who make this all happen, and compare that to the depth of knowledge and understanding of the church. Let them see the how the magic trick works.

Give me your argument in the form of a published paper, and then we can start to talk.

My previous confidence has been shaken somewhat, I don't think of most of what you put in..

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.

Beating RIED's head in exerted effort. Doesn't that technically make it work?

...........Do we get to stone KC?!?!

The people closely associated with the namesake of female canines are suffering from a nondescript form of lunacy.
"Anti-environmentalism is like standing in front of a forest and going 'quick kill them they're coming right for us!'" - Jake Farr-Wharton, The Imaginary Friend Show.